All About Sam (3 page)

No one was paying any attention to Sam. He was sitting on the rug chewing on his plastic pretzel.

Very quietly—just as stealthily as Anastasia had painted her dad's toenail—Sam put his pretzel down.

He reached over and put both hands firmly on the edge of the coffee table. He raised himself to his knees. Knee, he told himself. Knee.

Then he said—still to himself—foot. And he raised himself to one foot.

And again: foot. And he was on the other foot. He pushed hard. Now he was upright, the way he sometimes was in his crib, holding the sides.

That wasn't enough. He wanted to be upright on his own, like the grown-ups. So very carefully, very slowly, concentrating very hard, with his face in a frown, he let go with one hand.

It felt scary. A little wobbly. For an instant he touched the table again, just to steady himself. Then he took his hand away. Finally, he let go with the other hand.

He felt very tall, very brave. He stood there alone. No one was watching. Dad turned a page of the newspaper. Mom turned her knitters around and began knitting in the other direction. Anastasia dipped her little brush into the little bottle of toe paint again.

Sam eyed the distance from the table to the TV set. He thought about how to get there. Pick one foot up, put it down, pick the other foot up, put it down; then do the whole thing again, he thought.

He took off across the room, toward the TV. Halfway there, he stopped and called in a loud voice: "SEE ME? I'M
UP
!"

He heard his mother call, "Look! Sam's walking!"

He heard Anastasia shriek, "He's
talking,
too!"

He heard his father bellow, "What—in the name of—
what
is this on my toenail?"

Sam lost his balance. Splat. He landed on his diaper, and it was wet.

"Now," he said thoughtfully, "I'm down."

But he didn't mind being down, because he knew he could get back up. He knew he could walk to the TV, and he could reach the knobs and turn it on—
loud
—whenever he wanted. He could walk down the hall to the kitchen, when his mom wasn't looking, and open the cupboard under the sink and pull out the squeezy bottle of soap and squeeze it all smooshy on the floor—something he'd been wanting to do for a long

time. He could walk to the bathroom and unroll the interesting roll of paper that hung there on the wall. He could walk to Anastasia's room, and if his arms reached far enough—he was pretty certain they would—he could pull all the papers off her desk and crumple them into balls.

He could tip over all the wastebaskets. He could pull books out of the bookcases and tear their pages out. And if he yanked at the cords that hung down, he thought he could probably tip over lamps and make wonderful crashing noises.

Sam sat there in the middle of the living room and thought about the wonderful things that the future held for him as a walking person. Then he shifted himself to his knees.

Knee. Knee. Foot. Foot. Push. Up. Now he was upright again, and life was not going to be boring anymore. Now he was a real grown-up, and he hoped that soon they would get him some blue jeans like all grown-ups, so that he would never have to wear dumb baby overalls again.

"Here I go!" Sam said in a loud voice, and he was off and running.

"Where does the water go?" Sam asked, peering into the kitchen sink. He was standing on a chair, helping his mother wash dishes. She let him do only the plastic things, but it was fun, because he got to splash water around. He watched the water go down the drain with a gurgling sound.

"Into the pipes," Mom said. She dried him with a towel and helped him down to the floor.

Sam headed down the hall. It sure was fun, not being a baby anymore. Now that he was big, he could walk anywhere he wanted. He walked to his father's desk. Dad wasn't there. He was atwork.

Sam didn't know what
atwork
meant, except that it meant Dad wasn't around. When Dad was atwork, he disappeared. When the door opened, and Dad appeared, carrying a briefcase, then he wasn't atwork anymore.

Anastasia was never atwork, though sometimes she was atschool. And Mom was never atwork. Only Dad.

Today, Dad was atwork, so no one was in the room where the desk was, and Sam went in. He climbed onto his dad's chair and twirled it around. That was always fun. Sometimes he twirled around so much he got dizzy, and once he had even tipped over.

But today he didn't want to do twirling. He stood carefully on the chair after it stopped twirling, and slithered across the big desktop on his tummy until he reached what he wanted. The pipes.

Dad had a whole row of pipes standing up in a rack. Sometimes he took one out and set it on fire and ate it for a while.

Mom had told Sam that the water went into the pipes.

Sam took out the first pipe and looked into the end to see the water. But there was no water there. He dropped the pipe on the floor.

He looked into each pipe, one by one. No water. He poked his fingers in the pipes. Some of them had little bits of brown stuff like cereal in them. He tasted that. Yuck.

He dropped all the pipes on the floor and went back to the kitchen.

"No water in the pipes," he announced.

Mom looked over at the sink. "No," she said. "I guess not. It's all gone."

Sam frowned. He wandered into the bathroom, twirled the roll of paper around, and decided he wouldn't unroll it right now—he had already done that once today. He pulled on the handle of the toilet.

Flush. Sam loved that sound.

Mom appeared in the doorway of the bathroom. She sighed.

Sam was watching the water rush around inside the toilet. "Where does
this
water go?" he asked. "Into the pipes, too?"

"That's right," Mom told him.

So he went back to look at the pipes again. This time Mom followed him. She started to laugh.

"Not these pipes, Sam," she said as she picked them up from the floor and put them back on Dad's desk. "The water goes into the special water pipes, and then it goes under the ground, and after a long, long time it ends up in the ocean, and then from the ocean it goes up into the air, and then it comes raining back down again, and into the lakes, and back into the pipes, and someday it comes back into our sink."

She picked Sam up, sat him on her lap, and tied his shoes. "Did you understand all of that?" she asked.

Sam grinned. He didn't really. But he said "Yep," and gave Mom a kiss on her neck.

Into the pipes. Into the ground. Into the ocean. Into the air. And then it rains down.

He had an idea. When Mom was back in the kitchen again, making dinner, Sam went into Mom and Dad's bedroom. If he pulled out the bottom drawer of the bureau, he could stand on it and see what was on the top. There was interesting stuff on the top, sometimes.

Today, on top of the bureau, Sam discovered a piece of Kleenex. That was boring. Then he saw a thing called a lipstick. Lipstick wasn't boring. You could open it up and then you could write with it. He had done that once; he had written with the lipstick on Mom and Dad's bedspread.

Mom hadn't liked that. She had said, "NO, NO, NO!
NEVER
DO THAT AGAIN, SAM!"

So he didn't do it again. He didn't even open the lipstick. But he took it from the top of the bureau and went to the bathroom.

Carefully he dropped it into the toilet. When he pulled the handle, he knew, it would go into the pipes, into the ground, into the ocean, into the air, and then it would rain down. Lipsticks would rain down. And
that
would be interesting.

He almost pulled the flushing handle. But first, he decided, he would add more stuff.

He dropped in his plastic pretzel. Now it would rain lipsticks and pretzels. But that wasn't enough.

Sam looked around. He could see something interesting on the side of the bathroom sink—Mom's earrings. He stood on tiptoes, reached the earrings, and added them.

One of his sneakers had come untied again and he pulled it off. Would it be interesting if sneakers rained down, with lipsticks and pretzels and earrings? Yes, Sam decided. So he dropped the sneaker into the toilet.

Now he was ready to flush.

Maybe, Sam thought suddenly, Mom would like to watch.

He went back to the kitchen. Mom was just putting something into the oven. "Hi, Sam," she said. "Are you getting into mischief?"

"Nope," Sam said.

"What happened to your shoe?" Mom asked.

Sam grinned. "Come see," he said. He tugged at her hand.

Mom followed him to the bathroom, and Sam pointed, showing her the wonderful flush he was about to make.

"Oh,
nol
" Mom said in a loud voice. She reached in and pulled out the dripping sneaker. She pulled out the pretzel. Then the lipstick. Then the earrings. She dropped all of the wet things into the sink.

She knelt on the floor beside Sam. She gave him a kiss. "Sam," she said. "None of those things likes to be in water. Not shoes. Not toys. Not lipsticks. Not Mom's earrings. They don't want to be wet. Do you understand?"

Sam nodded.

"Promise you won't do it again?"

Sam promised, and Mom went back to the kitchen. He
did
understand. What he needed was something that
did
like to be wet.

He thought about Dad's big black umbrella. But he knew it wouldn't fit.

Then he thought of the perfect thing. He went to Anastasia's room and turned the wastebasket upside down so that he could stand on it and reach her goldfish bowl. Anastasia's goldfish was named Frank.

And Frank
loved
water. Sam knew that for sure, because once he had dumped Frank out, and Anastasia had screamed and grabbed Frank and filled the bowl with water again even before she mopped up the floor. "Frank
needs
water," she had explained to Sam. "Frank is very frightened and unhappy if he doesn't have water."

Carefully Sam dipped his plastic clown cup into the goldfish bowl. "Frank," he said, "you will be very happy."

He wished that Anastasia were home, instead of outside riding her bike, so that she could see how happy he was making Frank.

Frank floated very happily in the clown cup all the way to the bathroom.

He
loved
it in the toilet, because the toilet was bigger than the goldfish bowl. Sam watched him swim in the toilet for a long time.

Now, thought Sam, you get to go in the pipes. Under the ground. Into the ocean. Up to the sky.

And
then
you will rain back down.

He pulled the handle. "Yaaayyyy!" Sam shouted happily as he watched Frank spin and swirl.

He ran to the kitchen.

"I flushed Frank!" Sam announced.

He couldn't figure out why Mom wasn't happy about it. Dad, when he came home from atwork, wasn't happy, either. Worst of all, when Anastasia came in, Mom and Dad told her about it in very sad, quiet voices. And Anastasia began to cry.

That night, from his crib, looking through his window, Sam watched the sky. He waited and waited for it to rain goldfish so that he could give Frank back to his sister. But it never, ever did.